Second Call for Papers IGU-RGS, 15 - 20 August 2004, Glasgow, UK
Apologies for cross posting. Please note the deadline for abstracts is now Thursday
15 January.
MOBILITIES, MATERIALITIES, AND CITIES: THE ARTS OF DWELLING IN A
MOBILE WORLD
Sponsored by the Urban Geography Research Group and the Social and Cultural
Geography Research Group
Convenor: Alan Latham, University of Southampton
Email: [log in to unmask]
Recently there has been an upsurge in interest throughout the social sciences in the
idea of mobility. This enthusiasm for mobility is a product of at least three related
trends. Firstly, the realisation that we live in an evermore connected world has forced
the social sciences to recognise that a range of mobilities – both corporeal and non-
corporeal – are central to how contemporary societies are structured and ordered.
While it may appear something of a truism to state that social relations ordered
through mobility are different to those dominated by stasis, it is, nonetheless, only
relatively recently that a significant number of writers have started to seriously work
through what taking this acknowledgement of the importance of mobility might mean.
Secondly, a range of scholars in the fields of urban planning, human geography,
sociology, social history and anthropology have discovered the importance of a
range of background infrastructural systems and technologies to the functioning and
organisation of contemporary social life. These authors have shown how taken-for-
granted technologies from telephone systems, highways and expressways, to water
and sewage infrastructures are profoundly shaping the texture, rhythm and
possibilities of everyday social life. Thirdly, and finally, the interest in technology and
the social theoretical importance of mobility has been combined with a more general
concern within the social sciences to place corporeality and embodiment at the
centre of the social sciences. Much of this focus on corporeality and embodiment
has been organised through a consideration of how technology and technological
development are bound-up with more general social transformations.
The papers in the proposed session will engage with and add to this wider social
scientific interest in mobility. The session is particularly interested in papers that
explore the practices and techniques through which individuals and groups
negotiate contemporary patterns of mobilities – what we might call the arts of
mobility. As such, papers in the Mobilities, Materialities, and Cities session could
include (but are not restricted to):
* New mobile technologies and social life
* Mobile publics
* Politics of mobility
* Negotiating mobilities
* Community, friendship and mobility
* Sociality and mobility
* Automobility and urban life
* Cultures of mobility
* Histories of mobile cultures
* Imagining mobility
Proposed paper titles, abstracts and inquires about papers should be sent to the
session convenor, Alan Latham ([log in to unmask]), by Thursday January 15,
2004.
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